The Boys from Baghdad High
|language=Arabic with subtitles English |executive_producer=Alan Hayling Karen O'Connor Hans Robert Eisenhauer Sheila Nevins |producer=Ivan O'Mahone Laura Winter |co-producer=Alex Cooke |asst_producer=Fallah Al Rubaie Zaid H. Fahmi |sup_produce=Lisa Heller |editor=Richard Guard Johnny Burke |composer=Will Worsley Farhad Amirahmadi Mounir Baziz |story_editor= |location=Baghdad, Iraq |cinematography= |camera=single-camera |runtime=90 minutes |picture_format= |first_aired=8 January 2008 |related= |website=http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/this_world/7170477.stm |production_website=http://www.hbo.com/docs/docuseries/baghdadhigh/index.html }} The Boys from Baghdad High, also known as Baghdad High, is a British/Iraqi television documentary. It premiered in the United Kingdom at the 2007 Sheffield Doc/Fest, before airing on BBC Two on 8 January 2008. It also aired in many other countries including France, Australia, the United States, Canada, Germany and the Netherlands. It documents the lives of four Iraqi schoolboys over the course of one year in the form of a video diary. The documentary was filmed by the boys themselves, who were given video cameras for the project. Directed and produced by Ivan O'Mahone and Laura Winter of Renegade Pictures and StoryLabTV, for the United Kingdom's British Broadcasting Corporation, Home Box Office in the United States, and the Franco-German network Arte, The Boys from Baghdad High was produced by Alan Hayling and Karen O'Connor for the BBC, Hans Robert Eisenhauer for Arte, and Sheila Nevins for HBO. The four schoolboys are each of a different religious or ethnic background. The Boys from Baghdad High received high viewing figures when it initially aired in the UK, and was reviewed favourably in the media. It was named the Best News and Current Affairs Film at the European Independent Film Festival, won the Premier Prize at the Sandford St. Martin Trust Awards, and was nominated for awards at two film festivals. It also received nominations from Amnesty International, and the Radio Times Readers Award. Synopsis The documentary depicts the lives of four teenage boys and their families during the 2006–07 school year: Hayder Khalid, a Shia Moslem; Anmar Refat, a Christian; Ali Shadman, a Kurd; and Mohammad Raed, a Sunni Moslem. The attend Tariq bin Ziad High School for Boys in Zayouna, a mixed-race, middle-class neighbourhood of the Karrada district in Baghdad, Iraq. The film opens on the first day of the boys' final year of school. If they graduate, they will have the chance to attend university. The documentary is told from the boys' point of view; each has been given a video camera to record a video diary of his school and home life. Until recently, Zayouna had been a relatively safe area, but the sectarian violence that has segregated Baghdad into Shiia and Sunni zones is now extending into Karrada. The everyday task of driving to school runs the risk of roadside bombings and time-wasting security checkpoints. Curfews are frequent, the neighbourhood is rife with assassinations, muggings and kidnappings, and American Apache helicopters fly overhead on a regular basis. Towards the end of filming, the statistics are chilling: two of their fellow schoolboys have been killed, six have been kidnapped, and 75 have left Iraq. Many students are often absent from school; most are unmotivated and underperform academically. Ali reports the highlights from one night; there is no good news – only explosions, violence, and death. Anmar is more philosophical about the violence. He does not expect armed gangs to target the school, but knows he would be in danger if anyone knew he was Christian. Gunfire and explosions easily distract his studying. He is one of the few Kurds in Baghdad, and his family is more financially insecure than those of other boys; his family even has to siphon petrol from the car to run the back-up generator when, at one stage, the electricity is disconnected. Ali is resentful of the violence; while repairing the generator one night, he hears shooting in the street. He asks, "Why is it my job to fix the generator? I should be studying." The documentary highlights the similarities and differences between Western and Iraqi children. The teachers chastise the students for being late to school and not paying attention in class, in a scenario that will be familiar to children around the world. Anmar is worried because he has not been able to contact his girlfriend for many days. His mobile phone is the only way of contacting her, and she has not answered his calls, text messages or voicemails. He wonders if she has found a new boyfriend and no longer wishes to be with him, or whether something worse has happened, such as being injured or killed. Hayder's favourite lessons in school are English. He hopes to become a famous singer-songwriter and downloads the music videos and lyrics of American pop stars such as Britney Spears from the Internet so he can learn popular Western songs and dance moves. Mohammed is the class clown at school, and prefers playing sports and fooling around with his friends to studying. His mother is unaware of his humorous nature, believing him to be hard-working, self-sufficient and mature. She wants him to do well in school so he can graduate and attend university. In one scene in which she discusses her son, she says, "He is a self-starter and has had to learn everything for himself. I bought him a mobile phone. He doesn't use his phone for silly things like other boys." While she says this, Mohammed is shown laughing as he watches a video of butt-naked men dancing. Midway though the school year, Ali's family migrate to the more peaceful Kurdish region in Northern Iraq. After living in Arbul for months, Ali explains that he is feeling homesick. Bored by the relatively peaceful environment of Kurdistan, he misses the action and noise of Baghdad. With Ali gone, Mohammed feels lonely and "adopts" a bird with a broken wing and a mouse he finds in the house. Although caring for the animals brings him some comfort, his mother tells Mohammed get rid of the mouse because they she does not want vermin in the house. The documentary shows what the boys' families feel about life in Iraq. On the night Saddam Hussein was sentenced, Mohammed's family rejoice; they believed that if it had not been broadcast, they would have doubted the trial's fairness. When the day of his execution arrives, Mohammed's family are still certain the right decision was made, and his grandmother explains that the Iraqi people would have looked weak to the outside world if they did not execute the man who killed so many countrymen. Anmar's family, however, are upset at the execution. "This is not the right time to for a country's leader to be executed. The people in power are no better than he was", Anmar says. On New Years' Eve, Hyder's mother explains what Iraq was like before the Americans arrived. "In the beginning we were hopeful and all Iraqis were happy. They looked at Americans as saviours and thought things would get better. I was one of them. I'm neither illiterate nor highly educated; my analysis is based on what I gather from here and there. We shouldn't blame the Americans for everything. There's something wrong with us, too. The bloodshed needs to stop first. Sunni kills Shiite, Shiite kills Sunni. At least our neighbourhood is safer than some of the others. We should have waited to see what the Americans could achieve, that way we could see if their intentions were good or not." When Hayder's family become unemployed, they are forced to make financial sacrifices. Hayder loses access the Internet, and his mother starts selling their furniture. At the end of the school year, the boys take their final exams. The boys must pass all seven exams to graduate. If they fail two or fewer subjects, they can take the exams again, but if they fail three or more subjects, they must repeat the entire final year. After failing all seven of his mock exams, Mohammed knows he needs to perform well, but worries about his lack of preparation. When the results arrive, Anmar finds he failed English and Biology, a devastating blow to his family, who had decided to move to the safer region of Arbul if he had graduated. Hyder failed English and Biology, too, and has to resit them if he wishes to graduate, and Ali also failed two subjects. Mohammed fails four subjects, and must return to school the following year. As the documentary comes to an end, it is revealed that Ali did not resit his exams, and that he and his family left Iraq. Anmar passed his retakes, and hopes to study English literature at university. Hayder also graduated, but his family cannot afford to pay for his university course. Mohammed enrolled at a different school to repeat his final year, and works in his uncle's scooter repair shop. Production Concept The Boys from Baghdad High was co-produced and co-directed by Ivan O'Mahoney and Laura Winter. Before working on the film, O'Mahoney had been a United Nations peacekeeper in Bosnia and an attorney in the Netherlands, and had worked on the documentary How to Plan a Revolution. He had also worked for the BBC, Channel 4, CNN, and PBS in Ethiopia, Iraq, Sudan and Colombia. Winter had previously worked for CNN, 60 Minutes, CBS Evening News, CBS Radio, the Christian Science Monitor and the New York Daily News in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Jordan and Iraq. The Boys from Baghdad High was the first time she was credited as a director. O'Mahoney and Winter began working on the film in 2006. Winter had watched a film called The Women's Story, about two Iraqi women who had journeyed around the country and filmed what they saw. They wanted to make a documentary about "the people never seen on the evening news, of presidents, prime ministers, generals and militants ... who claim to know something of Iraq's future". Winter explained that "all these documentaries coming out of Iraq were done for or by adults. Iraqi children had not been more than a UN statistic about the dead, kidnapped or injured", so they decided to concentrate on what they viewed as the "real source of Iraq's future" – teenagers. "I wanted to tell the story of Iraq in a different way", said Winter. "As journalists, we do stories about kids and teenagers, but we don't hear from them. If you go to the UN reports, they are just a number and that's it." O'Mahoney was a little more reticent: he had recently worked in Iraq but did not wish to return due to the Civil war and the deteriorating condition of the country. When it was decided to use a school as a backdrop to the story, which could also be used to provide a chronological narrative, O'Mahoney and Winter realised it would be too dangerous for the students to be seen with either a Western or Iraqi camera crew because it would draw too much attention to them. This is why they decided that the students would film the documentary themselves. Casting They chose Tariq bin Ziad High School for Boys to source the students from. It is a school which was still holding onto the notion of a united Iraq, in contrast to the racially and religiously segregated country it was becoming. Having worked in Iraq in 2003, Winter knew that the Baghdad district Karrada was very mixed and integrated with high numbers of Shiites and Christians. She asked her former driver and translator and who had attended the school if he would contact the principal. Initially the school was suspicious of their intentions, but decided to trust the judgement of Winter's translator. Principal Ra'ad Jawad selected eight boys to take part in the documentary because because he knew they would be discreet, would not get bored, and would remain committed to filming their lives for a year. The producers wanted their cast to include girls, and even had families and a school on board, but the then Minister of Education refused to let them. Jawad travelled to London to meet the producers and he was trained how to operate the video cameras that the boys would be given. The cameras and tapes were sent into Iraq via the BBC News department, which were then passed onto the school. Jawad and two Iraqi associate producers trained the boys how to use the cameras. Two months into filming, four of the boys dropped out of the project, leaving Hayder Khalid, Anmar Refat, Ali Shadman, and Mohammad Raed. O'Mahoney and Winter never met the boys while the documentary was being produced because it was such a high-risk assignment. Filming The producers were diligent in ensuring the boys' security was never under threat. O'Mahoney explained: "They were under very strict security rules when they were filming. They were told not to act as news cameramen. They were not allowed to film in the street. They could only film at school or at home, in secure environments." Winter added, "they are not paid news cameramen, and that was not the point of the film. Would they normally be running down the street toward a firefight to film it? No. Would they run toward a bombing, knowing that there could be a secondary explosion or a group of soldiers, who could start, at any second, firing wildly into the crowd, to film a piece of video? No. That’s not real life for any Iraqi civilian." Nevertheless, Haydar filmed outside at night on occasion, explaining he had to be careful as people are robbed if they are seen carrying even a cell phone. On New Year's Eve, he and his friend celebrate with a bonfire in his friend's back yard, but after debating whether a noise they hear is fireworks or gunfire, Hayder rushes home. When another boy is driven to school one morning, they reach a special forces roadside checkpoint. He explains, "if they see me with a camera they will take me to prison, they'll think I'm a terrorist who wants to bomb them." Editing The students filmed more than 300 hours of footage, along with occasional footage from the two Iraqi associate producers. . It was transcribed, translated and edited into a 90-minute film. Receiving the tapes from Iraq proved difficult for Winter and O'Mahoney, who remained in the UK. They had to rely on reporters from many different news agencies, especially those in the BBC News's Baghdad Bureau high-risk team, to smuggle the tapes out of Iraq. When the curfews were enforced, weeks passed before they received new footage because it was impossible for anyone to leave their homes or the country. Of the footage that was not included in the documentary was Saddam Hussein's execution, which Anwar had filmed from the internet, from start to finish. "We had a big debate about whether or not that should go into the film," O'Connor explained. Water continued, "it was one of those things where to see it, it just gets you. But we had to ask ourselves, does it help our story? No." Footage that was nearly edited out included the scene where Anwar had to siphon petrol out of the family car for the house's generator, explaining to the camera that he needed to do it because their family was so poor. "That's tough," commented Water, "because that's a dishonor to his family." Distribution The Boys from Baghdad High received its world première at the 2007 Sheffield Doc/Fest, an annual film festival for documentary productions held in Sheffield, South Yorkshire. In the US it was screened on 29 April 2008 at the Tribeca Film Festival, and 1 August 2008 at the Traverse City Film Festival. The first time Winter and O'Mahoney met one of the film's subjects was at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, nearly a year after the filming had completed. Ali and his family had relocated to the US since completing the documentary, and so he was able to attend. Winter and Ali met a second time at the Traverse City Film Festival. The producers had tried to get the boys visas to enter the UK for a screening in London, but they were denied entry by the British Government. It premièred on television in the UK on BBC Two, a national terrestrial television network, on 8 January 2008 at 9:00 p.m. as part of the This World documentary series. It was broadcast in France and Germany on the joint-venture network Arte on 18 March 2008 at 9:00 p.m., with the French title Bagdad, le bac sous les bombes, and Die Jungs von der Bagdad-High in Germany. . It aired on the premium cable network HBO as Baghdad High on 4 August 2008 at 9:00 p.m., and was available on HBO's video on demand service until 21 September 2008. The documentary also aired in Australia on the Special Broadcasting Service, Canada on CBC Newsworld, and in the Netherlands on VPRO. The BBC made the documentary available for viewers from the UK to stream using its BBC iPlayer service for seven days after the initial broadcast. A Region 2 DVD of the documentary can be obtained, although it can only be purchased directly from the BBC and is not available in stores. Reception The Boys from Baghdad High was well received from the moment it premiered. It was nominated for a Youth Jury Award at the 2007 Sheffield Doc/Fest, shortlisted for an Amnesty International 2008 UK Media Award in the category for Television Documentary and Docudramas, and the European Independent Film Festival named it the Best News and Current Affairs film. It was nominated for the Readers' Award in the Radio Times, and in May 2008 it won the Premiere Prize at the Sandford St. Martin Trust Awards, which acknowledges excellence in religious broadcasting. The Trust's chairman and former BBC Head of Religious Broadcasting Colin Morris said of the documentary, "We saw the way faith breaks into secular life in the chaos of present day Iraq. Coming from different ethnic and religious backgrounds the boys showed that despite the war their daily preoccupations were much the same as those of teenage boys the world over – girlfriends, parents, sport, fashion, exams, music. Would their friendship survive? Ultimately the programme confronted British viewers with the question: 'What in God's name are we doing there?'" The film received a standing ovation from the audience at the Traverse City Film Festival, and at the Tribeca Film Festival, it was short-listed for the 2008 World Documentary Feature Competition, competing against eleven other non-fiction films for Best Documentary Film and Best New Documentary Filmmaker. When the documentary aired in the UK, overnight viewing figures totalled 600,000, which was three percent of the total television audience for that time slot. Reviews for The Boys from Baghdad High were generally favourable. The Huffington Post said, "the filmmakers' decision to hand out cameras to four teenagers is inspired", adding that because the depiction of their school-life versus the increasing danger was captured "with neutral equality", "the film is able to capture the interiority of its subjects more acutely than a straight-forward examination of violence would". Thomas Sutcliffe of The Independent said, "its storyline was governed not by a tick-list of stock narrative dilemmas and secrets but the cruel uncertainties that occupation and insurgency have brought to Baghdad." Time Out New York gave the film five out five stars, and PopMatters rated it 8 out of 10. The Washington Post s Paul Farhi said, "HBO has carved a niche as the TV home of some of the most compelling programs about the Iraq war... Baghdad High does no harm to HBO's burgeoning war credibility." However, Jennifer Marin, of the Los Angeles Times wrote at About.com that while being innovative and informative, and a noble experiment, the footage is "undistinguished and rough because the hands holding the cameras weren't skilled and the eyes framing the shots were not those of artists or keen observers." She thought that, with the exception of Mohammed, the boys lacked charisma, and that the film failed to capture the drama of living in a war-zone, due to the lack of a director calling the shots. Mark A. Perigard of the Boston Herald commented, "After the time you’ve invested a viewer, it’s not nearly satisfying enough. For all the questions this fascinating film raises, it might as well be written in sand." Bill Weber of Slant Magazine said, "putting the trials of MTV reality-show prima donnas in perspective, the middle-class quartet will be relatable to this BBC/HBO production's audience in their easy embrace of Western kid stuff... Directors Ivan O'Mahoney and Laura Winter balance portray an everyday sense of the adolescents' wartime anxiety with the more commonplace juvenile relief." New York commented that the film's premise of four high-school friends videotaping their senior year "sounds like a fluffy reality show"; similarly, The Huffington Post raised comparisons with MTV reality shows. "One observable and welcome difference between the Iraqi boys and nearly any high school-aged American on reality programming is the former's lack of performance. The Baghdadis, luckily spared cultural phenomena like Laguna Beach or The Paper, speak and act candidly and without melodrama." That juvenile relief was commented on by many; The Washington Post highlighted Mohammed's "tender concern for a household mouse he 'adopts'". In The New York Times, Mike Hale wrote, "Suddenly Ali is holding a large knife. 'He’s being naughty!' Mohammed says. Ali holds the knife near Mohammed and says, a little too unemotionally: 'Allah! This is the first hostage. I’m going to slaughter him this way.' Mohammed tells him to stop fooling around. Ali relents. 'O.K. He just got a presidential pardon. He can live.'". Reuters also commented on this, and more banter between Ali and Mohammed. "Ali is shown making a pretend hostage video with Mohammad, and then teasing his friend for his smelly feet. 'If Chemical Ali really wanted to destroy the north he should have fired a rocket with Mohammad's socks in it'." At the Q&A session following a screening at the Tribeca Film Festival, one audience member, a new recruit to the United States Marine Corps, told Ali, who had also attended, "I finally know what life is like behind those walls and what you guys are like, and it's been really, really fantastic." Variety, The Christian Science Monitor, LA Weekly, and the Los Angeles Times also praised the film. Many reviewers pointed out the similarities between the Iraqi boys and those from Western cultures. Peter Scarlet, the Artistic Director at the Tribeca Film Festival, said, "What's fascinating about the film that resulted is how very familiar and ordinary these kids are-they're not really all that different from your own teenagers or the kids you went to school with. The kids of Baghdad High also open us up to a very different sense of life in Iraq than what we've been seeing on the nightly news for five years." The Huffington Post said, "previously it had been unfathomable that students in Baghdad might be experiencing the same ephemeral and narcissistic heartbreak as we are in the United States." "Like students at any high school, they joke around, play soccer, listen to Tupac Shakur, and try to study", said Patrick Huguenin of New York's Daily News. "Much of the film shows the boys doing what most teenagers do – playing sports, dancing in their bedrooms, playing around at school." said Michelle Nicholls of Reuters. Farhi said, "They mostly struggle to be like teenagers everywhere. They listen to American rap music (one boy while studying the Koran), play basketball and soccer, roughhouse or just hang out ... The boys begin to stress out over their final exams. Failure means they'll have to repeat their senior year." He continued by saying, "Viewers will likely watch this concluding passage with a sense of relief. Worrying about tests and grades, after all, seems normal, the kind of stuff teenagers should be preoccupied with." Mark A. Perigard of the Boston Herald commented, "despite the cultural differences, Ali, Anmar, Hayder and Mohammad will seem instantly familiar to anyone who has spent time around a teenage boy. They like to wrestle each other, love Western music, dream big and have trouble buckling down in school." The depiction of the differences between the two cultures also received comments. Farsi described the school as having "all the charm of an abandoned prison", and continued with, "Visiting a friend who lives a few hundred yards away involves running a potential gantlet of kidnappers and snipers; getting to school on time means navigating military checkpoints. Before a big exam, teachers frisk their students for explosives," while Perigard said, "at night, their neighborhoods are riddled with gunfire and explosions", and Huguenin, "American teens wouldn't recognize other scenes showing how life slips into a heavily regulated series of checkpoints and curfews." Hale said, "The way the boys can tell without looking whether it’s an Apache or a Chinook helicopter overhead. The way the curtains are always drawn. The level of physical contact and affection among the men, which would be alien to American sensibilities." There were complaints however that the documentary did not depict enough of the political aspects of the Iraqi War. "The 90-minute documentary doesn't say much about the larger issues facing Iraq, but it does capture some small and captivating human stories... They live in what one boy describes as 'the most dangerous city on Earth.' You don't see much of Iraq's violence in "High," but you surely feel its gravity and their dread." Perigard said "is a personal story, not a political one", while Weber said, "Words on the country's combative political factions or the American agenda are scarce in Baghdad High". Hale commented, "While the boys talk frequently about violence and despair, they rarely discuss politics or ethnic differences (with the exception of Anmar, the Christian) and they almost never directly address the American presence. We do hear some parental opinions, which are surprisingly neutral. One mother says: 'We shouldn’t blame the Americans for everything. There is something wrong with us too'." References External links * * Baghdad High at HBO * * Category:Iraq War documentaries Category:Iraq War in television Category:Political documentaries Category:BBC television documentaries Category:American documentary films